Architect of the Korean Communist Party's rebirth; leader of the Workers' Party of South Korea
At his 1927 trial in Sinuiju, he ate his own excrement in court to feign insanity, securing medical release before escaping to Moscow.
The foremost leader of Korea's communist movement from the colonial era through liberation. He rebuilt the Communist Party of Korea and led the Workers' Party of South Korea, but after defecting north he was outmaneuvered by Kim Il-sung and executed as the scapegoat for the Korean War's defeat.
Career Timeline
- 1921Joined Korean Communist Party (Irkutsk faction) in Shanghai
- 1922Secretary of Korean Communist Youth League; attended Far East Peoples' Congress in Moscow
- 1925Co-founded Communist Party of Korea; General Secretary of Korean Komsomol
- 1928–1930Studied at International Lenin School, Moscow; joined CPSU(B)
- 1931–1940Comintern Eastern Secretariat cadre; led underground organizing in Shanghai and Korea
- 1945Rebuilt Communist Party of Korea; became its leader and General Secretary
- 1946–1949Founded Workers' Party of South Korea; Vice Chairman (de facto leader)
- 1948–1953Deputy Premier and first Foreign Minister of the DPRK
Rebuilding the Communist Party of Korea and Leading the Liberation-Era Left (1945–1948)
Upon hearing news of Japan's surrender on 15 August 1945, Pak Hon-yong immediately left the brick factory in Gwangju where he had been hiding for three years and headed for Seoul. On 20 August he issued the 'August Theses,' laying out an orthodox Marxist line: first sweep away feudal remnants through a bourgeois-democratic revolution, then transition to socialism. On 3 September he rebuilt the Communist Party of Korea around the Kyongsong Com-Group and assumed the post of General Secretary. At that moment the CPK was the most organized leftist force in the South, and it became the foundation for the Workers' Party of South Korea in November 1946. Pak joined Lyuh Woon-hyung's Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence and participated in forming the Korean People's Republic cabinet, but intense pressure from the American military government, including an arrest warrant issued in September 1946, forced him underground. After the Autumn Uprising (the Daegu October 1st incident), his organization led a general strike; in November he merged the Communist Party, the People's Party, and the New People's Party into the Workers' Party of South Korea, becoming its de facto leader. He attended the North–South negotiations in Pyongyang in April 1948 and remained in the North thereafter. For three years after liberation, Pak was the most powerful figure on South Korea's left under US military occupation.
The 1953–1955 Purge and 'Spy Case'
On 3 August 1953, barely a week after the Korean War armistice, Pak Hon-yong was arrested by DPRK security. The official charge was 'American espionage.' His 1939 meeting in Seoul with American missionary Horace Underwood to discuss support for Korean independence became the pretext for a spy conviction fourteen years later. In reality, the purge was Kim Il-sung's move to scapegoat the southern faction for the war's failure and eliminate his strongest potential rival. Pak was sentenced to death on 15 December 1955 and executed shortly after. Interior Minister Pang Hak-se is said to have personally fired the shot. The purge decimated the former Workers' Party of South Korea cadre, and Pak was erased from DPRK history as an 'anti-party, counter-revolutionary element.' Both the Soviet Union and China tried to dissuade Kim from carrying out the execution, but failed.